OpenAI’s popular artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, experienced a widespread global outage on Saturday, July 25, 2026. The disruption left thousands of users unable to access the service across multiple continents for approximately an hour. OpenAI confirmed the issues, stating it was investigating the problem for its core services.
Widespread Service Disruption
The outage began around 5 AM ET on Saturday, July 25, 2026, impacting users in the United States, Europe, India, Japan, and Australia. Many users reported difficulties loading chats, accessing previous conversations, or sending new messages. Some encountered "too many concurrent requests" errors, while others faced login failures and authentication issues.
Downdetector, a platform tracking service disruptions, recorded a significant surge in user complaints. Over 3,000 users in the United States and more than 1,500 in India reported problems accessing ChatGPT. Approximately 79% to 80% of these reports were directly related to the ChatGPT web version.[bleepingcomputer+3]
The service interruption extended beyond just the chatbot interface. OpenAI’s coding platform, Codex, and its developer API were also affected. As many as 12 API endpoints showed issues, impacting developers and businesses relying on these integrated services for their applications and workflows.[hindustantimes+5]
OpenAI Responds to Glitch
OpenAI quickly acknowledged the incident on its official status page. The company initially stated, "We are investigating the issue for the listed services," naming APIs, ChatGPT, and Codex as affected. An update posted around 5:30 AM ET confirmed active investigation into the disruption.
Engineers at OpenAI worked to address the problem. The company later announced it had applied a mitigation and was monitoring the recovery. By approximately 6 AM ET, OpenAI indicated that ChatGPT had fully recovered and was back online. Other reports suggested full restoration by midday or around 11:57 AM ET.[bleepingcomputer+3]
During the outage, OpenAI’s status page sometimes showed systems as operational even while underlying issues persisted. This type of inconsistency often happens when authentication systems face disruptions, even if the main AI models are still functional. OpenAI has not yet publicly disclosed the specific cause of this latest outage.[bleepingcomputer+3]
Recurring Reliability Concerns
This global outage on July 25 marks the latest in a series of service disruptions for OpenAI’s platforms. The incident followed closely after two other significant outages earlier the same week, on July 23 and July 24. The July 23 disruption also affected ChatGPT, Codex, and API services.
The July 24 outage reportedly lasted for nearly 24 hours before being resolved. This pattern of repeated service interruptions within a short timeframe has raised concerns among users about the platform's recent reliability. OpenAI’s own status history shows approximately 166 incidents over the past nine months, averaging about 18 per month.[m+3]
ChatGPT,in particular, has shown the weakest recent uptime compared to other OpenAI products over the last 90 days. The frequent outages affect a broad user base, including students, developers, and businesses who rely on the AI services for daily tasks.[thenextweb+1]
Users who experienced issues during the outage were advised to refresh their page, log out and back in, or check OpenAI’s status page for real-time updates. The recurring nature of these problems highlights the importance for users to consider backup AI tools for time-sensitive work.[thenextweb+2]
